[Mediawiki-i18n] Altering message string output for Javascript

[Trevor Parscal]

  On 8/11/10 12:40 AM, Roan Kattouw wrote:
> 2010/8/11 Neil Kandalgaonkar<neilk at wikimedia.org>:
>> OPTION 2:
>>
>> Figure out some way to alter parsing on the server for Javascript messages,
>> such that things like {{SITENAME}} are parsed, but {{PLURAL}} isn't (or, the
>> parse results emits an identical {{PLURAL}} template call).
>>
> What I think would be the easiest solution is to simply /mark/
> messages as needing server-side parsing. If such a flag is set, we'd
> run the message through parsemag (or maybe even parse, in some cases)
> before sending them to the client; if not, we'd send it to the client
> verbatim and the client-side parser (with its very limited wikitext
> support) would handle it.
>
> Roan Kattouw (Catrope)
Just wanted to add some clarity.

The point here is not that detecting which messages need to be parsed 
fully or partially is hard, it's that extending the parser to render 
{{PLURAL}} and {{GENDER}} differently has been proving to be 
problematic. The concept is, some processing could be differed to the 
client, such as which plural or gender case to use, in which case we 
would want to process the entire message, except {{PLURAL}} and {{GENDER}}.

Marking messages as "render me on the server" or "render me on the 
client" doesn't solve the problem - we want to process many messages on 
both, such as "{{int:something}} tests {{PLURAL:$1|this thing|these $1 
things}}", which would be transformed to "Something tests 
{{PLURAL:$1|this|these $1 things}}", so the client can finish processing 
it without having to do an API call back to the server to get the value 
of {{int:something}}.

- Trevor